Towards a Minimalist Machine

This chapter describes a machine that efficiently generates syntactic structure using fundamental Set and Pair Merge operations beginning with a pre-ordered Lexical Array (LA) of heads. The machine also implements Probe-Goal agreement and Phase theory to correctly converge on a variety of syntactic constructions discussed in the linguistics literature. Displacement is driven by Edge features. The machine state consists of a current syntactic object (SO) and the input (LA). It also incorporates a goal stack that effectively short-circuits the need to search inside the current SO. The machine is capable of locally deciding on the appropriate Merge and Probe operations at each Merge step by considering the Label and features of the current SO and the LA head, without the need for (temporary) over-generation or lookahead. Non-determinism, i.e. multiple convergent SOs, is also possible in cases where theory demands it